Carmen de Burgos’s place in a genealogy of Spanish feminist thought

Abstract

Carmen de Burgos was an extraordinary woman even by today's exacting standards of women who work, raise children, write, travel, and engage in intellectual life. This chapter situates her within a genealogy of Spanish feminist thinkers that begins in the eighteenth century with Father Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, and ends with the Equality or Enlightenment and Difference feminists of the 1980s and 1990s. The author begins her genealogy of Spanish feminism with Burgos's early Spanish predecessors Benito Jeronimo Feijoo and Concepcion Arenal. All three thinkers stress the importance of women's development for the public good. In focusing on women's rights, Burgos is the only Spanish feminist thinker of her own generation, which includes Maria Martinez Sierra and Margarita Nelken, who argues for their feminist program from a strictly legal point of view. Such an approach in the Spanish feminist canon will have to wait for Lidia Falcon some thirty-six years later in 1963.